For nearly 70 years, Long’s Drug Store in Bearden has sold prescriptions and other items to aid customers’ physical health while doling out soda fountain comfort treats and good conversation.

But the store – unique in Knoxville as both a family-owned pharmacy and as a drugstore that still features an eatery within its walls – will soon be no more.

As was announced and quickly spread in the news, owner and head pharmacist Hank Peck announced that the store at 4604 Kingston Pike was to close on Jan. 16. Prescription records will be transferred to the CVS by Kingston Pike and Northshore Drive.

As Peck reflected on the morning of Jan. 8 in between conversations with old friends and well-wishers milling around in a scene that slightly resembled a funeral visitation, he admitted to being a little sad.

“It was just time with the landscape as it is in health care,” he said. “It was difficult for us to work within those guidelines. There are a lot of changes today with health care and it is not necessarily driven by us and the business model we have had for so long.”

He said he is not retiring, but he and a Long’s technician will be joining the staff at the Bearden CVS. It will be quite a change for him after coming to work there in 1994, when he purchased half of the business from his uncle, Ed Peck.

As the Shopper News begins a two-part series, a glance at its history reveals that the store dates to 1956, when White grocery store owner Dwight McDonald was developing the current Kingston Pike Shopping Center and encouraged Clarence Long and John Benson to open a drugstore there. Long had been with the popular Ellis and Ernest drug store on Cumberland Avenue by the University of Tennessee campus, while Benson was with the Medical Arts Pharmacy.

“My father (Jim Peck) came in 1959 to work for them,” the younger Peck said. “He and Doc were both very much alike. They were good pharmacists and good fun and knew people. It was a good combination.”

Unfortunately, Peck said, Long was killed in an automobile accident in the 1960s. The chain had grown to four stores around Knoxville by then, and the others were sold off and the names were changed. But Peck’s father kept the Bearden store and the Long name in honor of and out of respect for his late partner.

Hank Peck said as the business developed under his father and uncle, he became a licensed pharmacist and expected to work there. It was a shock to him when his father encouraged him – or told him – to work somewhere else first.

“I thought never in a million years I would be working anywhere but here,” he said with a laugh, adding that after working a few other places, he was able to come there after buying his uncle’s share. He greatly enjoyed working with his father, who, before his death in 2021, continued coming into the store after health problems forced his retirement.

For Hank Peck, the work has been quite rewarding, work he said he will miss. “I’ll miss just about everything, particularly the people I work with and the people I see every day,” he said. “I love being able to practice that way, and in this environment, mostly because it’s very community minded.”

Peck does not have the longest current tenure at Long’s Drug Store. That belongs to Ruth Pate, who runs the soda fountain and grill after coming there 45 years ago, when late friend and former colleague Sharon McDaniel told her about an opening. She, too, is sad about the closing. In fact, she hinted that the payment from the customers for serving such popular items as hamburgers, club sandwiches, house-made salads and milkshakes has come in friendships as well as money.

“I’ve just met so many people, and they’re just like family to me,” she said. “When my husband passed away, there were a lot of people there (at the funeral), and half of them were from here.”

One customer has been longtime Knoxville resident Ann Warwick, who has frequented the store for decades, including when she and her late husband, Wilbur, were raising five daughters on nearby Noelton Drive.

“It was a wonderful place for the whole family to go, knowing you could always get something to eat,” she said, adding that you could also charge food or prescriptions to your account until a few months ago. “And Hank has always been wonderful about helping us.”

Peck, whose customers have also included UT sports officials and others – noted Knoxvillians who are highlighted by their framed photos sitting above the lunch counter – said he has never felt like simply a business owner there due to the multifaceted support.

“We’ve been so fortunate to be a custodian for this community,” he said. “I always felt the community owned this.”

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Long’s Drug Store in Knoxville closing and owner looks back